So I have this problem every time I connect my laptop to my Samsung HDTV. I thought this was an issue with driver/video card but I wasn’t convinced because I wanted a solution. Finally, today, I managed to find a solution for this. Here’s how you can solve it:

Go to display driver settings. In my case, since my laptop has two graphics cards – Nvidia 640m and Intel HD 4000 and since the primary display driver is Intel, I went to Intel HD Graphics Control Panel.

Click on Display to view display settings.

Ensure that you have connected your computer to TV using a HDMI cable. If you have, you should see something like “Digital television SAMSUNG” in the combo box under Select Display.

Make sure that you have selected “Display Settings” tab and “Basic” twisty has been expanded. Under “Scaling”, select “Customize Aspect Ratio”. In the preview section, you will see two bars (horizontal and vertical) appear. You can adjust the aspect ratio using those. As you can see from the screenshot below, 63 vertical and 65 horizontal works perfect for me. Once you’re done experimenting, hit apply.

Additionally, you might want to save those settings under a different profile. You can click on save profile button to do that. Give it a meaningful name and you’re done. That way, you can keep different profiles for different monitors/TVs.